Into the Unconcious

The surface tension of our talk
awkwardly ended in silence on

the island after we’d kayaked.
I’d yakked on about nothing,

thinking you’d forget how,
out on the water, I brought up your

horror of lurking sharks,
far from the thoughtful guy

I think you thought I was.
Then I saw the perfect stone,

honed by waves and centuries,
and gently handed it to you.

You knew what to do with it.
If it had skipped just once,

bounced off the surface in
continuing its path,

as if a sentence we fished
with to describe the water,

or several times, like ellipses, those
hopeful omissions . . .

a son, an old age together . . .
perhaps we could have flown

home to try again. But it flew
through wind we stood in, tossed out,

and we watched it break the surface
first, then sink into the depths.

 
 
 
Thom Schramm is the author of Thorn House (Yas Press, 2025) and The Leaf Blower (Blue Cubicle Press, 2016), and editor of the anthology Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic-Depression (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008). He lives in Seattle.